Since 1996, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide has been the bible for JavaScript programmers—a programmer's guide and comprehensive reference to the core language and to the client-side JavaScript APIs defined by web browsers.

The 6th edition covers HTML5 and ECMAScript 5. Many chapters have been completely rewritten to bring them in line with today's best web development practices. New chapters in this edition document jQuery and server side JavaScript. It's recommended for experienced programmers who want to learn the programming language of the Web, and for current JavaScript programmers who want to master it.

David Flanagan

David Flanagan is a programmer and writer with a website at http://davidflanagan.com. His other O'Reilly books include JavaScript Pocket Reference, The Ruby Programming Language, and Java in a Nutshell. David has a degree in computer science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives with his wife and children in the Pacific Northwest between the cities of Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

The animal on the cover of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, sixth edition, is a Javan rhinoceros. All five species of rhinoceros are distinguished by their large size, thick armor-like skin, three-toed feet, and single or double snout horn. The Javan rhinoceros, along with the Sumatran rhinoceros, is one of two forest-dwelling species. The Javan rhinoceros is similar in appearance to the Indian rhinoceros, but smaller and with certain distinguishing characteristics (primarily skin texture).

Rhinoceroses are often depicted standing up to their snouts in water or mud. In fact, they can frequently be found just like that. When not resting in a river, rhinos will dig deep pits in which to wallow. Both of these resting places provide a couple of advantages. First, they give the animal relief from the tropical heat and protection from blood-sucking flies. (The mud that the wallow leaves on the skin of the rhinoceros also provides some protection from flies.) Second, mud wallows and river water help support the considerable weight of these huge animals, thereby relieving the strain on their legs and backs.

Folklore has long held that the horn of the rhinoceros possesses magical and aphrodisiac powers, and that humans who gain possession of the horns will also gain those powers. This is one of the reasons why rhinos are a prime target of poachers. All species of rhinoceros are in danger, and the Javan rhino population is the most precarious. Fewer than 100 of these animals are still living. At one time, Javan rhinos could be found throughout southeastern Asia, but they are now believed to exist only in Indonesia and Vietnam.

The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont’s TheSans Mono Condensed.

I started doing serious software development in 1961, and I have mastered many languages. This book services two uses for me. It is full of code samples which are well designed and professional in detail. Secondly, it is an excellent reference manual for core Javascript and well as Client side Javascript programming. I use it everyday in my development work and highly recommend it for Javascript developers.

There is too much detail for me, but after all the book is called definitive guide and that is definitivly correct. A very complete book and I am happy to have a copy that I can always use as a reference.

A better name for this book would be JavaScript Bible, alas seems that this trademark name already belongs to another publisher: Wiley. Reading this book, well, made me feel exactly as reading the Bible: advance a little, go back, read slower, resume. Thing is, the amount of information thrown at you is overwhelming and thus begs to come back and revisit a chapter or two. Please do not take this wrongly, that is actually a good thing, this book supposed to be a hard read for those who are new to JavaScript: the King of the Scripting Languages for the Web which to my astonishment being attempted dethroned by Dart and possibly other contestants.

It is a fact that the book is being revised (a big +) for the 6th time and republished, so 100% David sure knows his subject.

However, to my dismay, I spotted several minor, but very obvious technical errors which I submitted to an already quite long errata at different points in time, none nevertheless appeared on the list as of the time of publishing this review.

If to continue on a negative note, one other bother for me (not related to the book though) was a hardship experimenting with all the code due to lack of a JavaScript IDE with a good debugging support. The author advocates using FireBug in FireFox which is not my preferred choice of a browser at the moment, but I have not figured out how to debug (set breakpoints) the code from the book. At the moment I have to blame myself here trying to grasp JavaScript being a non-functional and SQL programmer. Let me state this again - this is not a basic grounds kind of a book, but rather a comprehensive (1,000 pages plus!) set of very detailed information about every little aspect of the JavaScript. However, a large chunk of the book is occupied by the Client-Side JavaScript Reference which, can I say this: redundant?

On the positive note (finally), the author covers most topics extremely well as RegEx, CSS, graphics to name a few, just not too long and not too short, but enough to get you going. Also the notes about each popular browser differences and nuances are very thoughtful because that must help developing better cross browser web applications. HTML5 is covered, too, but to a lesser extent than I imagined to myself it had to, I will not argue with the author here though as it is a book about JavaScript after all.

My closing remark, this is a worth every penny book with which you can grow as a mature developer, one would find answers in it to most programming techniques, but again, this book should not be your first book learning the basics of the JavaScript, or may be not even a second.

It is hard to not to give this book a 5 out of 5 rating, even though a 4 begs to be given, but since it is already a 6th edition, hey, I have a lot of respect to its loyal readers.

Disclaimer: I received this book for free as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review program.

David Flanagan's writing is clear, his explanations of JavaScript concepts are understandable and his appreciation for the subject is evident on every page. This book is absolutely *the* JavaScript reference.

It's not a tutorial for beginning programmers, but I do think that advanced-beginner/intermediate programmers coming from other languages could learn JavaScript from this book.

Aside from the reference value of the book, the pleasure of reading David Flanagan's incredibly clear writing alone is worth the price. This book will make you fall in love with JavaScript.